November 1995 / Illinois Issues / 10An analysis by MICHAEL HAWTHORNEState Sen. Walter Dudycz is shrewder than he's willing to
admit when it comes to the volatile subject of affirmative
action.

The Chicago Republican ignited a fierce debate earlier this
year when he introduced legislation to prohibit race and gender
preferences in college admission and hiring policies and in
contracting and hiring by state and local governments. He argues such preferences end up discriminating against whites.
Although his proposal was sent to a subcommittee, the traditional legislative burial ground, hundreds of opponents crowded into hearings Dudycz held last summer in Chicago and
Springfield.

At the hearings, civil rights activists noted that whites continue to hold more than 80 percent of the jobs in two-thirds of
the agencies, despite 20 years of affirmative action in state
government. The director of the state Department of Human
Rights said there is no preferential treatment given to unqualified minority job applicants. She cited statistics that suggest
there isn't widespread discrimination against whites, who
make up 78.4 percent of Illinois' population. Gov. Jim Edgar,
meanwhile, said the state's affirmative action laws shouldn't be
scrapped because they don't set specific requirements — or
quotas — for minority participation in jobs and contracts.

But for the media-savvy Dudycz, who also is a Chicago
police detective, attacking affirmative action plays well in his
largely white, middle-class Northwest Side district. He says
he's expressing the frustration of many whites, including scores of his fellow white police officers, who believe racebased preference programs allow "unqualified" minority applicants to get jobs over "qualified" white candidates. Dudycz and
others say affirmative action promotes "reverse discrimination."

Although Dudycz' hearings seemed to lend more heat than
light to the debate about racial and gender equity, he isn't worried. "Protest me," he had dared a Hispanic construction contractor earlier this year. "March in front of my [office]. I'll get
more votes."

Playing with the politics of fear
The sentiment that sparked the Illinois hearings is part of a
nationwide trend. The politics of race — often an undercurrent
in American political campaigns — has come out of hiding.
During the past two years it has become respectable to challenge race-based remedies, if not the nation's stated goal of
racial equity. The intellectual underpinning for challenging
affirmative action includes such books as The Bell Curve:

Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Charles
Murray and the late Richard J. Hennstein. The analysis gave
new currency to an old argument — that blacks are inherently
less intelligent than whites — providing a foundation for those
who argue that programs designed to overcome economic and
social obstacles do little good in the long run. Now comes
Dinesh D'Souza with The End of Racism: Principles for a
Multiracial Society. More subtle than Murray and Hennstein,

November 199 51 Illinois Issues/11

Figure 1. State job breakdown, 1990-1995 According to the secretary of state's office, the breakdown in state employment
for whites, blacks and Hispanics has been stable for the past five years.

D'Souza builds his case against race-specific remedies on
moral and cultural grounds. He believes merit alone should
determine career and social advancement.

That principle might be achievable in a robust economy.
When the government and corporate sectors went through a
period of rapid expansion during the 1970s, affirmative action
helped to open doors for talented and educated minorities by
encouraging companies to hire nonwhites. In his 1979 book,
The Declining Significance of Race, University of Chicago
sociologist William Julius Wilson argued that "the very expansion of these sectors of the economy has kept racial friction
over higher-paying corporate and government jobs to a minimum."

Flash ahead to 1995. America is in the midst of dramatic
corporate downsizing and wages are stagnant. Government
forecasts predict the economy is on the rebound, but hardly a
day goes by without an announcement that a major corporation
is slashing its workforce, putting thousands on the unemployment line and leaving others wondering whether they'll also be
left without a paycheck.

"Affirmative action has become a scapegoat for the anxieties of the white middle class," writer Michael Kinsley noted
earlier this year in The New Yorker. "Some of those anxieties
are justified; some are self-indulgent fantasies. But the actual
role of affirmative action in denying opportunities to white

people is small compared with
its role in the public imagination
and the public debate."

Economic insecurity has
always given some politicians
an opening to advance their
careers. But civil rights activists
fear decision-makers want to
roll back whatever gains we've
made in closing our racial divisions.

California is setting the pace.
Gov. Pete Wilson is a longtime
moderate Republican who
ardently supported affirmative
action throughout most of his
political career. But with defense plants closing and his
state's economy on the skids,
Wilson reversed course earlier
this year and began waging an
assault on race and gender preference programs, starting with
admission to the University of
California system. While the
tactic couldn't save Wilson's
erstwhile presidential campaign,
there's no shortage of candidates
willing to attack affirmative
action. GOP presidential candidates Bob Dole and Phil Gramm
both say they want to eliminate
the policy.

The language of racial division
For his part, Dudycz says he questioned affirmative action
long before Wilson became a convert. But after the torrent of
opposition at his hearings, Dudycz suggests he's willing to
craft a compromise he says will eliminate abuses while maintaining the state's goals for racial and gender equity.
"Affirmative action is not something which I object to," he
says. "Discriminatory practices that are being utilized under
the guise of affirmative action, causing reverse discrimination,
is something which I am fighting."

Senate Republicans vow to produce a study that spotlights
abuses. But Rose Mary Bombela, the director of the state
agency responsible for monitoring compliance with affirmative
action laws, says widespread "reverse discrimination" is a
myth. Only 35 of the 902 discrimination complaints filed with
the state Department of Human Rights during the past six years
were filed by white males, Bombela says. Of those, only three
were supported by substantial evidence.

In the political world, though, perception often is more
important than reality. Some analysts believe Republicans are
in a position to benefit from that perception by using affirmative action as a "wedge" issue in appeals to voters disenchanted with the Democrats. Instead of advancing their own strategy on affirmative action, the Democrats have been forced to

12/November 1995/Illinois Issues

defend the status quo and respond to a language of fear coined
by the policy's detractors.

Ironically, several historians credit a Democrat for being a
harbinger of the current debate over affirmative action. Former
Alabama Gov. George Wallace, infamous for his 1963
"Segregation forever!" inaugural address and his 1968 independent presidential bid, is the Godfather of racial code words
that appeal to white anxieties about the progress of blacks.
Taylor Branch, author of the civil rights history Parting the
Waters: America in the King Years, highlighted the technique
in a recent review of a Wallace biography: "Without harping on
racial epithets, as everyone expected him to do, Wallace talked
all around race by touching on the related fears of domination,
coining new expressions such as 'forced busing' and 'big government,' which were anything but common cliches 30 years
ago." More recent additions to the Wallace-inspired lexicon
include "quotas" and "reverse discrimination."

Race-based remedies
Minority lawmakers and civil rights activists say we are living in a fantasy world if we believe governments, universities
and businesses will voluntarily diversify in today's racially
polarized climate. "As long as bias still exists, there is a reason
to maintain affirmative action," says state Sen. Earlean Collins,
a Chicago Democrat.

Currently state officials seek
10 percent minority participation in building and road projects (5 percent for minority
firms and 5 percent for those
owned by women). Highway
contracts also are reserved for
minority-owned firms in the
Chicago area. Though the
results are mixed, there is no
question that affirmative action
has created opportunities that
otherwise wouldn't be available
to minorities. State Sen. Miguel
del Valle, another Chicago
Democrat, notes that while affirmative action is portrayed as
only benefitting racial minorities, firms owned by white
women have received substantial business through the state's
preference programs.

Yet, many conservative intellectuals — white and black —
contend that race-based preference programs actually serve to
block the progress of blacks as
they emerge from decades of
legalized segregation and other
forms of racism. They attack the
policies from a different angle,
suggesting that affirmative
action and welfare programs undermine black initiative.

There are no such arguments about traditionally accepted
forms of "affirmative action." Elite universities frequently seek
geographical diversity by turning away better qualified New
Englanders to admit a Midwestemer or the child of an alumnus. As Kinsley points out, veterans-preference programs violate the oft-stated principle that a job should go to the best qualified candidate. "Some veterans may have sacrificed nothing in
particular, while nonveterans who have sacrificed greatly in
other ways get no preference, or may even lose out to a less
deserving veteran," Kinsley wrote in The New Yorker. "The
point is not that giving veterans a preference is a bad idea —
only that, like any group generalization, it is approximate. Yet
we live with it."

Charles Morris, vice chancellor for academic affairs at the
Board of Regents, says Illinois has had a long history of preferential treatment at public universities. During the 1800s, he notes, state universities were open only to white children.
Affirmative action has helped to erase decades of racial and
gender discrimination, Morris says, but "equal opportunity in
higher education for minorities and women remains a distant
goal."

The disparity is highlighted by employment figures from
the state's flagship university. There were only 52 black and 44
Hispanic faculty members among the 1, 993 tenured or tenure-

Figure 2. Breakdown of state hiring, 1990-1995Breakdown of hiring in state government for whites and the two largest
minority groups, according to data provided by the secretary of state.

November 19951 Illinois Issues/13

Table 1. State agency employees by gender and race

The secretary of state's report for 1995 and the depiction of the categorization by gender and race within various
Illinois state agencies.

track professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign last fall. Because there is a shortage of black
Ph.D.s graduating from the nation's major research universities, those figures aren't likely to improve much in the near
future.

Results also are mixed when it comes to hiring in state agencies. Some departments, such as Children and Family Services, Mental Health and Public Aid, boast high concentrations of
minority employees. Yet 90 percent of the 7, 171 employees at
the Department of Transportation are white.

Theresa Faith Cummings knows how difficult it is to diversify the state work force. She used to be the only black employee at the state Abandoned Mined Lands Reclamation Council.
Now she oversees minority recruitment and affirmative action
for another predominantly white state agency: the Department
of Natural Resources.

The new department is made up of what used to be the
Department of Conservation and a handful of other agencies.
Fewer than 100 of the consolidated agency's 2, 000 full-time
workers are minorities, Cummings says. "I'm trying to get people tested so their names are on the list of potential job candidates, but it's tough."

Part of the problem used to be geography. Minorities generally live in urban areas, while much of the former conservation department's work was in rural areas. The new department, though, has entities in all 102 counties.

"I think the lack of minority employees can be attributed to
people in-house knowing other folks and letting them know
about vacancies," says Cummings. "Those are the people who
traditionally get jobs in this department."

Like veterans-preference programs, hiring people based on
their connections violates the principle that merit alone should
determine who gets a job or contract. But many of the same
politicians attacking affirmative action make no pretense about
using their position to steer state jobs and business to campaign
supporters. In fact, Illinois politicians have a long history of
promoting patronage in jobs and contracts, despite court rulings intended to curb cronyism.

Cummings is trying to change that. Backed by Brent
Manning, the department's director, she constantly reminds
office managers that they need to give minorities the same
opportunities afforded to white job candidates. "It's hard to
believe that coming over here from my old job is an improvement," she says. "It shows we've still got a long way to go."

Decoding the discourse
Proponents of affirmative action argue that the program has
yet to fulfill its promise. Critics also offer credible evidence for
the need to re-examine the results of race-specific remedies.
But we will need to decode the debate first. Perhaps we have
drawn the line at affirmative action because it remains the most
acceptable way to discuss race. By attacking the results of
affirmative action, critics can appear to be against the policy
without raising the specter of racism.

By debating affirmative action, politicians could clarify
what we as a society will and won't stand for. Such a debate
also could be used to divide us further.